African History Commons^™

Failure To Protect?: Applying The Drri-2 Scales To Rwanda And Srebrenica, Elizabeth Mason

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article critically reanalyses the action, or lack of action, taken by UN peacekeepers in Rwanda and Srebrenica in the 1990's. The lack of action of UN peacekeepers in Rwanda and Bosnia has long been criticised as a conscious decision made by peacekeepers to not act in defence of those being targeted but instead to act as bystanders of genocide when they had the ability to prevent acts of genocide taking place. This article re-examines the actions of the UN command under Romeo Dallaire in Rwanda and Thom Karremans in Srebrenica, Bosnia in terms of the stress-related factors which influenced …

Women's Political Participation Aided By Constitutional Provisions In Post-Conflict African Nations, Roksana Gorgolewski

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

After two major continental conflicts, many African countries were forced to re-evaluate their constitutions and inherent political structures. This left a window of opportunity for greater female political participation as political leaders and members of the peacemaking process. This project will focus on selected African post-conflict states during the 1970’s to 2000’s that have re-written their constitutions. The general query asks whether those rewritten constitutions have contributed to greater gender equality in the legislature of those states and which constitutional provisions work best at promoting and maintaining gender equality. By studying Geisler’s book Women and the remaking of politics in …

Amjambo Africa! (December 2020), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue

Boko Haram .................................2/3

Publisher’s Editorial ........................4

Meet Georges Budagu Makoko .....4

Elections/immigration reform .......5

Translations

French ............................................7

Swahili............................................8

Somali ............................................9

Kinyarwanda...............................20

Portuguese ............................20/21

News from Africa.....................10/11

Piece Together Project .................12

I’m Your Neighbor Books.............13

Pious Ali mourns Rawlings of Ghana ....................14

A Man on the move.......................15

Black Mainer project.....................16

Finance/Business............................19

Auto Insurance ..............................21

Poem by Ekhlas Ahmed................22

Guest columns...............................23

Titi de Baccarat .......................26/27

Amjambo Africa! (November 2020), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue

batimbo Foundation Family ..........2

The Power of We.............................3

election 2020................................../5

Panel on childcare in maine............5

Publisher’s editorial ........................6

Translations

French ............................................7

Swahili............................................8

Somali ............................................9

Kinyarwanda...............................20

Portuguese..................................21

CovID in maine ..............................0

DiriGo TouchPass ..........................12

Youth photography.......................13

market basket..................................4

A Shooting Star................................5

Community News............................6

organization updates...................17

Telling room poetry.....................18

Finance ...........................................19

Guest columns...............................22

The mix...........................................25

Kennedy Park little library ........27

Biljana Jovanović, A Rebel With A Cause Or: On ‘A General Revision Of Your Possibilities’, Tijana Matijević

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

By analysing Yugoslav writer Biljana Jovanović’s early novels, the essay follows her possible literary speculations on the capacity of the Yugoslav society to fulfill the promises of the revolution, together with her imagining of an alternative form of sociability, as that which could result in universal, human emancipation. Offering a peculiar portrait of the urban society of the late seventies in Yugoslavia, in her novels Jovanović tests if and how the problem of women’s emancipation is connected to the problems of class. Yet, a failure of class emancipation, an ‘impossibility to revise’ the society is antagonized from the scrupulous and …

Veronica Porumbacu’S ‘Return From Cynthera’ (1966): A Conceptual Manifesto Of Socialist Feminism, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Veronica Porumbacu (1921-1977) was a Romanian poet and translator who has been unjustly forgotten today due to her proletcultist poems of the 1950s. Yet her work was widely published and well-known during the socialist regime, and is especially relevant for the two decades of growth and ideological innovation of the 1960s and 1970s. In my article I analyze a remarkable volume of hers published in 1966, situating it in the context of her work and in the wider frame of the political context of Romania. I argue that Return from Cythera can be considered a conceptual manifesto of socialist feminism, …

Agency, Biography, And Temporality: (Un)Making Women’S Biographies In The Wake Of The Loss Of The Socialist Project In Yugoslavia, Tanja Petrović, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay seeks to deepen our understanding of women’s agency in socialist societies. Focusing on socialist and post-socialist Slovenia, it explores the ways agency reveals itself in interviews with and biographical portraits of the socio-politically active women – or “political workers” (politične delavke), as they were called during Yugoslav socialism – Mara Rupena Osolnik and Aleksandra Kornhauser Frazer. In these texts, agency unfolds as a mosaic of multiple, naturally intertwined activities and engagements aimed at the common good and at improving the position of women and other socially marginalized groups. This kind of agency – understood as the ability to …

Editorial: Gender Relations And Women’S Struggles In Socialist Southeast Europe, Dijana Jelaca, Nikolay Karkov, Tanja Petrović

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

For readers versed in the tradition of North Atlantic feminist theory, the intersection of “socialism” and “feminism” is relatively uncomplicated. As a rule, the theory proffers a critique of the “double oppression” that women experience under patriarchy and capitalism, with the exact relationship between these two systems then up for debate. While often not explicitly thematized, the theory’s geographical roots in North American and Western European struggles and contexts inform its epistemological practice and organizational protocols.

Towards Women’S Minor Cinema In Socialist Yugoslavia, Dijana Jelaca

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay theorizes the concept of women’s minor cinema in socialist Yugoslavia, conceptualized through examples of cultural texts that circulate within the so-called women’s genres: romance films, “chick flicks,” and TV soap operas. Women’s cinema is here not defined solely as films made by women, but rather, films that address the spectator as a woman, regardless of the spectator’s sex or gender. I argue that, in the context of Yugoslavia, such works frequently articulated emancipatory, feminist stances that did not demarcate a dichotomous opposition to the socialist state as such, but rather called for the state to fulfill its original …

The Return Of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair, Jasmina Tumbas

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay considers women’s emancipation in Socialist Yugoslavia as central to the socialist project. I focus on the feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s, aswell as contemporary engagements with the question of Yugoslavia. I put in conversation performance works by Sanja Iveković, Vlasta Delimar, Marina Gržinić, and Šejla Kamerić. The title of this essay, “Return of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair” points to how contested the position of Yugoslav women was during socialism, and how much it remains so today, albeit for very different reasons. As I show in the article, Yugoslav women in the arts embraced socialism as …

The Other Side Of Everything, Dir. Mila Turajlić (Hbo Europe, 2017), Dragana Obradović

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The Other Side of Everything is a documentary about an apartment in Birčaninova 20, a leafy street in Belgrade, Serbia. It is the family home of Mila Turajlić, the film’s director (known for her much-lauded film Cinema Komunisto from 2010), who uses this well-appointed interior to explore the intimacy of history.

General, Dir. Antun Vrdoljak (Hrvatska Radiotelevizija, 2019) The Diary Of Diana B., Dir. Dana Budisavljević (Pff, 2019), Sanjin Pejković

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Ideologically charged arguments about truth, often linked to fabrications of the past, have been discussed for decades in post-Yugoslav countries. They have also contributed to memory conflicts in different discourses. In addition to relativizing historical facts, marginalization of one’s own crimes and enlargement of others have also contributed to fragmentation of the truth and the emergence of parallel stories about the historical past.

Review Of Gender In 20th Century Eastern Europe And The Ussr, Edited By Catherine Baker. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, Katharina Wiedlack

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The anthology Gender in 20th Century Eastern Europe and the USSR is a collection of fourteen essays on a wide range of gender-related topics, from motherhood to concepts of masculinity, sexuality, and professional work.

Lilijana Burcar, Restavracija Kapitalizma: Repatriarhalizacija Družbe [Restauration Of Capitalism: Re-Patriarchization Of Society], Sophia, Ljubljana 2015, Iva Kosmos

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In her book Restavracija kapitalizma: repatriarhalizacija družbe (Restauration of capitalism: Re-patriarchization of society), Lilijana Burcar compares the systemic and structural conditions of women’s position in socialism and capitalism.

Chiara Bonfiglioli, Women And Industry In The Balkans. The Rise And Fall Of The Yugoslav Textile Sector. (I.B.Tauris 2019, 230 Pages, 1st Ed.), Agata Zysiak

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

“For us it was much better, for us personally, for people it was much better during socialism than it is today, in any case.” (p. 1) This quote from a textile worker opens Chiara Bonfiglioli’s book, but the story presented is by no means a nostalgic tour exploring collapsed factories or reproducing homo-sovieticus stereotypes.

Kristen Ghodsee. Second World, Second Sex. Socialist Women’S Activism And Global Solidarity During The Cold War. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018. Isbn 978-1-4780-0181-2 (Pbk), 328 Pp., Renata Jambrešić Kirin

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

While most recent feminist studies on the socialist heritage are preoccupied with the conjunctures of postcolonial and postsocialist conditions of the 1990s and beyond, Kristen Ghodsee’s book Second World, Second Sex (2018) evokes the most vibrant decade of women’s global activism marked by joint initiatives of women from both socialist and decolonized societies from the Global South.

A Study Of West African Slave Resistance From The Seventeenth To Nineteenth Centuries, Adam D. Wilsey

History in the Making

Accompanying the dawn of the twenty-first century, there has emerged a new era of historical thinking that has created the need to reexamine the history of slavery and slave resistance. Slavery has become a controversial topic that historians and scholars throughout the world are reevaluating. In this modern period, which is finally beginning to honor the ideas and ideals of equality, slavery is the black mark of our past; and the task now lies before the world to derive a better understanding of slavery. In order to better understand slavery, it is crucial to have a more acute awareness of …

Slavery And The Search For Belonging In Modern Sudan, William Fant

History in the Making

For many Sudanese, the migration of Islamic society into Sudan has produced difficulties in identifying belonging. Centuries in the making, Sudan has become a split nation in which the south has retained much of its African identity, while the north has become increasingly Islamized. While no discernable traits separate the divided portions of Sudan, the division has allowed the dominant north to forcibly gain control of the entire nation. This phenomenon has led to increased discontent among the regions, resulting in civil war and the reintroduction of slavery. Although the physical division in Sudan is as blurred as the ethnic …

The Western Media And The Portrayal Of The Rwandan Genocide, Cherice Joyann Estes

History in the Making

On December 9, 1948, the United Nations established its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Genocides, however, have continued to occur, affecting millions of people around the globe. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda resulted in an estimated 800,000 deaths. Global leaders were well aware of the atrocities, but failed to intervene. At the same time, the Western media's reports on Rwanda tended to understate the magnitude of the crisis. This paper explores the Western media's failure to accurately interpret and describe the Rwandan Genocide. Recognizing the outside media’s role in mischaracterizations of the Rwanda situation …

Amjambo Africa! (October 2020), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue

bus Shelter Project ..........................2

Victoria Pelletier’s story..................3

Publisher’s editorial ........................6

Financing higher education..........12

World Market basket ..............14-15

Metamorphosis awards ................17

News from Africa.....................18-19

Chess Game by Ali Ali...................19

letters to the editor......................24

Guest columns ...............................25

New Mainers Alliance ...................25

translations

French............................................7

Swahili ...........................................8

Somali............................................9

Kinyarwanda ..............................20

Portuguese .................................21

Sports In Africa, Past And Present, Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur, Gerard Akindes

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

These groundbreaking essays demonstrate how Africans past and present have utilized sports to forge complex identities and shape Africa’s dynamic place in the world.

Since the late nineteenth century, modern sports in Africa have both reflected and shaped cultural, social, political, economic, generational, and gender relations on the continent. Although colonial powers originally introduced European sports as a means of “civilizing” indigenous populations and upholding then current notions of racial hierarchies and “muscular Christianity,” Africans quickly appropriated these sporting practices to fulfill their own varied interests. This collection encompasses a wide range of topics, including women footballers in Nigeria, Kenya’s …

The Trokosi Tradition In Ghana: The Silencing Of A Religion, Rhonda Martinez

History in the Making

When does tradition and religion infringe upon human rights and who has the right to impose restrictions on them? Slavery is still an ongoing phenomenon that should no longer be denied. Trokosi, still being practiced today, is a relatively unknown African religion in which young girls are sexually enslaved to pay for crimes committed by their families. This paper highlights the terrible tradition of trokosi in order to bring public awareness to its three-hundred-year practice. Through the examination of a variety of secondary sources, definitions of slavery and explanations of the trokosi traditions are first established. Next, debates for and …

Psychiatry, Mental Institutions, And The Mad In Apartheid South Africa. By Tiffany Fawn Jones. (New York: Routledge, 2012)., Chris Moreland

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

There Is No Bournville In Africa: Chocolate Capitalist, African Cocoa Workers, And International Labor Relationships From The 19th Century To The Present, Ryan Minor

History in the Making

The issue of labor exploitation and the impact of neocolonialism, have in recent years, become extremely important as our global community continues to shrink. This paper focuses on the relationships between European chocolate manufactures and West African cocoa laborers from the 1870’s to the present day as a means of discussing the complex connections that have developed between industrial capitalism and labor in Africa. This study will address two key questions: One, if labor exploitation is necessary for industrial capitalists to maintain the high levels of profit they desire; and two, if the exploitation of labor becomes increasingly easier the …

Rwanda’S Inyangamugayo: Perspectives From Practitioners In The Gacaca Transitional Justice Mechanism, Jean-Damascène Gasanabo, Donatien Nikuze, Hollie Nyseth Brehm, Hannah Parks

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

The Gacaca courts have been the subject of much academic work. Yet, few studies have examined the elected individuals who presided over Gacaca court trials, reflecting a broader paucity of research on local practitioners of transitional justice. Accordingly, this study asks two questions: (1) How did the Gacaca court judges, known as Inyangamugayo, perceive their duties to fight impunity and facilitate reconciliation? And (2) What challenges did the Inyangamugayo face as they sought to implement these duties? To address these questions, we interviewed 135 former Inyangamugayo. Our interviews shed light on the Inyangamugayo’s understandings of punishment and …

Undressing For Redress: The Significance Of Nigerian Women’S Naked Protests, Bright Alozie

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Social media went abuzz on July 23, 2020, when hundreds of women – mostly naked – staged a protest in the northwestern state of Kaduna, Nigeria. Wailing and rolling on the ground, they protested at the killing of people in ongoing attacks on their community.

The protesters, mostly mothers, demanded justice and called on the government, security agencies and international community to intervene.

Such naked protests are not new in Nigeria. Traditionally, among the Igbo and Yoruba of Nigeria, stripping naked signifies a curse against those targeted. Sometimes, mothers strip naked to put a curse on their truant sons or …

Amjambo Africa! (September 2020), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue...

Indigo Arts Alliance.....................p.2

publisher’s editorial.....................p.4

registering to vote.......................p.4

French............................................p.5

Swahili...........................................p.6

Somali............................................p.7

School resource officers ..............p.8

U.S.-Canada border.....................p.8

News from Africa.........................p.9

Finance/buying a home.............p.10

Guest columns..............11/14/20/21

World market basket...........p.12/13

Héritier Nosso............................p.15

Community org. News........p.16/17

Kinyarwanda..............................p.18

portuguese .................................p.19

outdoor learning.......................p.23

bus Shelters................................p.23

Designing Analog Learning Games: Genre Affordances, Limitations And Multi-Game Approaches, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

This chapter explores what the authors discovered about analog games and game design during the many iterative processes that have led to the Lost & Found series, and how they found certain constraints and affordances (that which an artifact assists, promotes or allows) provided by the boardgame genre. Some findings were counter-intuitive. What choices would allow for the modeling of complex systems, such as legal and economic systems? What choices would allow for gameplay within the time of a class-period? What mechanics could promote discussions of tradeoff decisions? If players are expending too much cognition on arithmetic strategizing, could that …

How Igbo Women Used Petitions To Influence British Authorities During Colonial Rule, Bright Alozie

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Selected petitions and written correspondence between Igbo women and British officials between 1892 and 1960 shed fresh light on how women navigated male-dominated colonial institutions and structures of the time.

African women acted in varied and complex ways to the situations they found themselves in. This ranged from subtle to overt opposition, and sometimes violent resistance.

One response was through petition writing as women took to the pen to articulate their concerns. In my research, I examined several petitions written by Igbo women to British officials during the colonial period. I found that petition writing was part of the complex …

Eternal Victims: The Sufferings Of The Twa People From Their First Contact With Other Peoples Until The Present Day, Travis Meyer

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

No abstract provided.